Tell the Wind and Fire(73)

They had set up cages in Times Square. That was the one thing that stopped me. The cages hung on thick black chains, in front of the blaring bright colors of advertisements proclaiming new fashion brands and new movie stars, the unforgiving dazzle of Light power and commerce. I did not have to wonder what they were for. I remembered how the cages in Green-Wood Cemetery had looked, the black edge of magic to the metal, the sound as the spikes went into flesh and drank both blood and Light. I remembered my father’s screams.

They had not torn down the cages to spare lives. They had torn them down so they could build them somewhere new, somewhere there would be a flood of fresh victims for those black jaws. And these cages looked different somehow, looked even worse than the cages at Green-Wood had. I remembered the sword one of the rebels had cut down Gabrielle Mirren with, how its dark edges had distorted the world. The outlines of these cages were writhing black strokes cut into the sky.

They were empty, I told myself. They were empty, they were empty.

For now.

Nadiya lived in a big apartment block, red-brick with the windows full of white blinds, sternly anonymous. The only thing that differentiated her building from the line of identical buildings was a stoop that somebody had painted mint green in what must have been a fit of optimism. That had been a long time ago. The mint-green paint was peeling to reveal scraps of ghost-gray wood beneath.

Nadiya did not buzz me in, but she came downstairs when I pressed the bell. Long before she reached the door, I saw her bright hijab through the wire-mesh window. Her step was slow as she opened the door, and her eyes were huge as they met mine. She looked afraid.

I wondered how I looked.

“You knew Ethan better than I thought you did,” I said slowly. “Didn’t you?”

Nadiya bit her lip. “Yes,” she said. “But it’s not what you think.”

“You don’t know what I think.”

Nadiya was no fool. She looked at me, her gaze level and tranquil, and she waited to hear what I thought.

I thought of the accusation of treason against Ethan, what they had actually said: that he was passing secrets to a member of the sans-merci.

Ethan had said, when his father was killed, that it was all his fault.

Ethan believed that the cruelty to the Dark city had to stop. Ethan always acted to stop other people’s suffering. If people had approached him and asked him for his help to change the world, he might have helped.

I was an idiot. Carwyn had not committed treason. It had been Ethan all along.

I had thought of the treason as a crime and thought it could not have been Ethan, that it must have been committed by a doppelganger, because doppelgangers were capable of anything.

I had committed a crime myself when I undid Carwyn’s collar. People committed crimes every day. Ethan was not the sole exception to every rule, was not innocent of everything.

Acting to help people in the Dark city was like him, and not like Carwyn at all.

“Ethan gave the plans of his apartment building to the resistance,” I said. “Along with other information about the cages in Green-Wood Cemetery. You two were engaged in helping the resistance against the Light Council. You thought . . . Someone was meant to use the secret passage to talk to Charles Stryker, weren’t they? But they killed him instead.”

Nadiya began to nod, slowly and continuously. Her hijab blazed in the shadow of her hall like a flame.

“You were helping the sans-merci,” I went on.

Nadiya said, “No! Not those lunatics who have taken the city. Of course not. Ethan and I and . . . some of our friends, we wanted life to get better, for everyone, in both cities. We wanted a change in policies, to have the cages and walls taken down so there could be peace between us. We didn’t want any of this. We found people who agreed with us, who were printing pamphlets that spread the truth about how the Light Council’s policies affect the Dark city. We’ve been doing it for two years, and it never caused any harm. Ethan spoke on television, and we all celebrated his rallying call to change. That was all we wanted: change, not death. We only wanted to make a difference. We only . . . We only wanted to help.”

It wasn’t as simple as that. My Aunt Leila had started by attending speeches and passing out pamphlets. Some of the same people who were killing now had likely been passing out pamphlets with Ethan and Nadiya. I suspected Nadiya knew that as well as I did.

Trying to make a difference meant that you risked doing harm.

She and Ethan had at least tried to do something good. She and Ethan had meant it for the best, had wanted change and thought it could be change for the better. I didn’t feel I had a right to judge either of them when I had been so scared of losing what I had that I never tried to change anything. I had frozen myself and forced myself to be blind and deaf as well as still, and it had all been for nothing.